Early Decision (4 page)

Unless, of course, she was just the next turn of the screw, the most elaborate device yet for robbing kids of their autonomy, and this is what worried her as she returned home from the offices of Blanchard, McHenry, Winsett & Blair. She always felt a little bit dirty after a parents' meeting, and Mr. Blanchard had been one of the worst. Plus it grated that Ewan Monroe from Modern Novel was up and coming, squirreling through those corridors as a second-year associate, while she was treading water with high school seniors. The difference in their occupations seemed a measure not of aptitude but of virtue, and also somehow of heart.

But this isn't forever, she told herself. “Not forever,” she said aloud as she circled her block, looking for parking. In her father's own words, her work was an “excellent stopgap” for a young woman waiting for her life to start. Though if she were honest, it was more precisely a stopgap for a young woman waiting for her
boyfriend's
life to start. While Martin was out in Los Angeles breaking into television and scouting places for them to live, which was where he'd been since the New Year, when his latest show at Steppenwolf closed and he took a sabbatical to try for the next big thing. An agent had seen him in
Stonewater Rapture
and taken him for a drink; turned out they'd almost overlapped at Yale, and he thought Martin had the look. God, did he; his height, his breadth, his wide, clean shoulders; the deep brown curls he wore pulled back in a ponytail, gladiator-style. But what could they do? It didn't make sense for Anne to go west with him; he was crashing on floors and living by his wits. She needed to keep something cooking in Chicago until he got his foot in the door.

Remembering Martin cheered her. Just the image of him in her mind countered that beaked boy, Ewan, and his happily plodding life. She imagined their future life in L.A., a bungalow behind a jasmine hedge, eventually a child asleep upstairs. For now, Anne's home was in the lone apartment building on the block, her flat sandwiched, appropriately enough, between a gorgeous married couple on the ground floor and a batty singleton called April upstairs. On bad days, she thought Fortune was offering her the choice in starkly proximate terms. On good days, she felt perfectly poised over the happily grounded life awaiting her.

But April. My God, was she getting bad. April
Penze
was her name. Irritating in every way. A perennial paralegal hunting for a husband,
esquire,
or anyone really who would keep her in Candies wedges and highlights. She played singles volleyball on Monday nights and singles foosball on Thursdays and in the summer took singles booze cruises along Lake Michigan, Bud Light and watery G&Ts departing from Navy Pier on the half hour. Even her name was bothersome: Was that
pence
or
penzey
?
Pen-zay?
Or just plain
pens
? The word on the buzzer was like a piece of grit in Anne's days. Anne understood that her irritation was born of her terror of ending up like April: midthirties, with tinseled hair and tapping nails, like a freezing alley cat, alone. Being conscious of the origin of her aversion only heightened Anne's ire. She clung to the fact that Martin once referred to April as “that trashy chick upstairs.”

April and Anne had coexisted, however, until a recent episode that had revealed that Anne's distaste was more than reciprocated—which was fascinating as well as troubling—and which had escalated matters considerably. Anne had just been returning from her morning run with Mitchell and had paused to read the headlines of her
New York Times
. She insisted on receiving the paper in hard copy for two reasons: for the ability to do the crossword in pen; and for the pleasure of the moment when she and Mitch came in puffing from the lakefront air and stood in the vestibule, the first thin sun coming through the streaked glass, while Anne slid the paper out of its plastic sleeve and saw the day's headlines revealed. As silly as it seemed, it did actually feel like the world in her hands: the paper's dire tone was like an invitation to an important event. With all that was so distant—Martin on the West Coast, her friends grasping brass rings all over the country, her parents sitting in their lonely chairs out in the suburbs, her life seemingly perched just beyond where she could reach—the immediacy of the paper in her sweaty hands made for a moment of belonging every morning.

And often, just at that moment, April Penze would burst through the vestibule door on her way to work. She never said hello or good morning in reply to Anne; just gave her an odd look and bashed out onto the street, letting the door slam on a haze of department-store perfume. It went without saying that April didn't stoop to gather up one of the many papers on the floor. She didn't read the
Tribune
or
Crain's
or (of course) the
Times
. Maybe this was the source of her frustration; maybe she resented the daily pile of papers between her and the door. Maybe Anne simply took the brunt of that.

But one morning late that spring, on one of the first truly warm days, when May 1 had passed and all Anne's students had checked in to confirm they'd mailed deposits to their top choices, she had come in from an especially good run and was heading up the stairs to the second floor as April was flying down from the third, and where they passed, on the first landing, Mitchell shinned by April's wobbly heels, and although Mitchell was gentle as a lamb, April narrowed her eyes at Anne and said, “Keep that dog away from me.”

“What?” asked Anne. In years of sharing those stairs, this was the first time April had spoken to her.

“Keep the damn dog away from me.”

“He's going up to our house,” Anne replied, flustered. Her heart resumed its pounding. “We live here. He's on his leash. He's just going up the stairs.”

“Yeah, no shit,” April hissed. Then she passed, and said again, “Just keep him the hell away from me. Filthy mutt.”

The door slammed behind April. Anne felt heat rising along the sides of her neck and up into her scalp. Insults gathered on her tongue. But it was too late. Mitchell sat by their door, glossy and calm, waiting to be let in to his water and breakfast. It did not occur to Anne that April might be afraid. She could not find a shred of sympathy. April was just a flat-out bitch. As aggressive as Mitchell was mild. Rabid.

After that, they had managed to avoid each other for most of the summer. But Anne fed off of the trails of crap perfume she left in the halls, and pored over misdirected mail for clues to April's depravity. Travel brochures for Acapulco. Carpet-cleaning coupons. Something from “North Shore Cupid,” who advertised to “Businessmen and Professional Ladies” and boasted of “thirty-two bull's-eyes and counting!”

But then, midway through August, Anne's paper had begun to go missing. It would be there in the pile when she left for her run at six, but it was gone by six forty-five. Monday through Friday, only, and only the
Times
. All the other papers remained. Anne imagined April taking but not reading it; one morning she even went so far as to check the trash bin on the corner, expecting to find the furled
Times
there atop the heap. No luck. Every morning, it just vanished.

So this was war. Anne let it escalate. She stepped neatly over her paper every morning, and as she ran the summer lakefront, white sun on still water, she worked over and over the problem of April. She always meant to think carefully about the conversation she'd had with Martin the night before, if in fact he had called—often he complained that it got too late Chicago time before he was able to take a break—but his words, as confounding as they were, were too passive to take the stage from April. What's more, to best April, Anne had to have Martin in her life, even though Martin had commitment problems, to put it mildly. If she'd been wise, she'd have sorted out Martin. But to hear her thoughts, to feel the churning in her belly as she pounded out five miles along the waterfront, you'd have thought it was not Martin but this strange, sad woman April she'd been thinking she'd marry for—what was it?—five years now.

 

T
HE MORNING BROUGHT
three e-mails, two of which sported little red exclamation points. Anne clicked on the first, from WinnetkaOrion, and noted to ask Hunter if he'd ever studied astronomy.

Hey Anne,

I thought about the assignment you said, but I can't write an email to someone else and send it to you. Sorry, but it feels bogus and weird. Plus I had a long talk with Nicole about all the stuff we talked about, and she thinks I should write about Montana more and less about the community service stuff, and I wanted to know what did you think of that?

Thanks,

Hunter

Hunter was pushing back. Excellent. Clearly there was something he felt worth protecting. She tapped back:

Dear Hunter,

Nicole's idea is excellent. I look forward to reading. Please, if you can, send through to me before we next meet. Don't sweat spelling/punctuation. I'm not your English teacher.

Best,

Anne

She skipped over the second message, from MarionCPfaff, because the third was from Martin:

Annie,

Sorry I didn't call last night. Peter's got me lined up with a manager, which is crazy. Like a social secretary, a butler and a babysitter all rolled up into one. Have two auditions today so heading out for coffee and cigs. Will try later.

How're your kiddoes shaping up? Tell them you'll be taking Columbus Day weekend off. I don't want the pitter-patter of little elites to distract us.

xM

PS Remind me to tell you about crazy burlesque show!

Martin had nailed a certain genre of missive capable of unsettling Anne in every line. Concise and harrowing, possibly catastrophic. He was the Stephen King of romantic correspondents. Nothing was safe: not the news of the new manager, who kept him from calling her; not the cigarettes, which disgusted her; not even the sweet innuendo of his impending visit—potentially confirmed here, though who knew for sure—which was followed by an insult to her students, and thereby to her. That lone
x,
too formulaic for affection. And a postscript to leave her, kindly, with visions of naked women in her head, as they clearly were in his.

Martin's notes glided in under her radar, roughing up her heart but, on their surface, appearing ordinary and even sweet. She was left thinking that
she
was the one making things complicated. This dovetailed nicely with a larger sense in society around her, among dating singles at least, that women were generally the ones who made things complicated. So then she felt guilty and a little bit ashamed, and decided, again, that she'd stop thinking about it altogether. She clicked on Mrs. Pfaff's e-mail instead.

Dear Anne,

I hope it's okay that I'm e-mailing you. I should probably call you to talk about Hunter's college list, which we received from his school's college counselor yesterday. Just to give you a sense, his green light schools are Denison and the U of I. And I hate to say that she's listed Amherst as a red light. Obviously this can't be a good place to start. I'd send it to you but I don't want Gerry to see it as is and I don't know how to work the scanner. I can type the schools in an e-mail to you if need be. Please let's discuss as soon as you have some time. Would you be available this afternoon maybe? I'll have my cell on at the gym and home by 4:30.

Thank you so much.

Sincerely,

Marion Pfaff

Ah, the schools. Their names were spoken like jewels: emerald and ruby, Middlebury and Brown. Each child brought home a list divided into three groups, from the least likely to offer admission to the most. Some parents considered it an opening bid. Others collapsed. College counselors had past years' statistics to guide them, and hunches, and at the very best prep schools they had years of experience placing kids exactly where they thought those kids belonged. By the time Anne was working, the top colleges were in such hot demand that the list was sent home largely as a corrective. Mothers wept and fathers raged. Schools they'd never heard of, schools whose presence atop a résumé would condemn it on their desk, schools attended in their minds only by some high school classmate, dimly remembered, who'd failed a class or two, OD'd.

For the rare child of a trustee or a major prospect, the list was a smoke screen: ten applications would be made on the pretense of this being a meritocratic process. But the first-choice school would have opened a file on the child once his PSATs were posted. The result was already assured.

For Anne, much of the work lay in managing these lists. How to carve, from the great shared dream of college destiny, a range to fairly suit each child? And how then to help bring round the parents, in their bafflement and their shame? More accurately, how to awaken these families from a fantasy that held colleges up bright and shining and implacably steady in character, to reveal each as just what it was—a living, breathing institution—struggling to serve young minds weaned on ambition and fear and heading into a job market that matched conscription to greed and made interns of all the rest?

Take Middlebury: one thought immediately of all the blond kids with a green streak, the vegans, the skiers. Take the Ivies: the Euro kids wanted Brown. Jews, Yale or Penn. WASPs wanted Princeton. Cold athletes Dartmouth. Hot athletes, Stanford. Cornell was big and seemed possible but Ithaca was a high price to pay. Columbia for the city kids. Everyone wanted Harvard, if only to say they got in.

Then the cult schools. Tufts, Georgetown, Duke. Big states that shined like Ivies: UNC, UVA, Cal. The cluster of California schools, Claremont McKenna, Pomona, Scripps. USC for the screenwriters and baby producers. Reed for the ceramicists with sky-high SATs. In the Midwest, Chicago and Northwestern—polar opposites, both polar—and Oberlin and Kenyon (mild poets and musicians). Denison rising fast. Wash U: sharp, but in St. Louis. The Boston cluster, BC BU Northeastern Wheaton Emerson. MIT, not so much—if you were the MIT type, you knew it, and you probably didn't care about other colleges except for maybe Caltech, RPI, Rice. Mid-Atlantic: Villanova, Wake Forest, Washington and Lee, and the middle D.C. schools, GWU and American. Johns Hopkins for the premeds and writers who couldn't reach Yale. Davidson, which was not Dickinson, though both deserved discovery. Vanderbilt for the skinny girls with dreams of the South. Tristate: NYU if cash was no issue or you intended to train at Juilliard. The Hudson River, art-and-English schools: Sarah Lawrence Barnard Bard Vassar Skidmore. B-plus Manhattanites turfed upstate: Hamilton, Colgate. Way upstate: St. Lawrence. The places where preppy kids went when they got turned down by their top choices: Trinity, Connecticut College, Richmond, Sewanee. Big drinkers in mining country: Lehigh and Bucknell. The Maine schools, BatesBowdoinColby, said in one breath, for Bostonian stars and lesser Grotonians. Williams and Amherst, twinned, tiny, elite. Funky-smart kids into free sex: Wesleyan. Funky-brilliant kids terrified of sex: Swarthmore. Outliers: Emory, Rollins, Elon, Marlboro, Carleton, Puget Sound. Colorado College for mountains and a block schedule. St. Andrews, Edinburgh, for those needing to get away. Rounding out the lights, like stars scattered beyond the constellations, every state school other than the big three, though Anne was forever wishing she could make the parents understand what was on offer there.